Head Meets Heart—Here

VIDEO: What makes Penn Staters stand out doesn't appear on a diploma. Rachel Brennan, associate professor of environmental engineering, rolls up her sleeves to develop ecosystems that purify wastewater.

Head Meets Heart—Here

Twenty-four campuses. 17,000 faculty and staff. 100,000 students. Over one-half million active alumni. All proving that the true measure of success is what you do to improve the lives of others. Penn State lives here.

Researchers plan to work with the Maasai to better understand the ways in which they currently respond to disease risk and climate adaptation, and then use that knowledge to introduce culturally relevant innovations to reduce vector-borne infections.

“Pollinator decline not only has alarmed the scientific community but has gained prominence in the popular press, raising the public's awareness about threats to our ecosystem.”—Christina Grozinger, associate professor of entomology in Penn State's College of Agricultural Sciences.

Image: Penn State

Honey bee colonies are collapsing in record numbers. A multidisciplinary team, made up of Penn State faculty and students, is looking at a number of different systems, including honey bee genomics, bioinformatics, and insect physiology, all with one goal in mind: to help the honey bee grow and thrive in the face of this crisis.

Penn State freshman and aerospace engineering major Ben Garelick assembled a printed 3-D model of the Penn State Lunar Lion team's spacecraft during a team meeting. The Lunar Lion team brings together multiple disciplines and expertise from a variety of students to design and create a robotic spacecraft that could land on the Moon by 2015.

Amr Elnashai, Harold and Inge Marcus Dean of Engineering at Penn State, and Luigi Di Sarno, assistant professor of earthquake engineering at the University of Sannio, Benevento, Italy, have released a second edition of their text “Fundamentals of Earthquake Engineering: From Source to Fragility.”